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At MoMA, ‘Permanent’ Learns to Be Flexible

Franz Kline's “Painting Number 2,” one of the works now being exhibited without a frame.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

THE European tourists, students with sketchpads and others who throng the painting and sculpture galleries of the Museum of Modern Art every day may not notice anything out of the ordinary in Room 19 on the fourth floor, but visitors who know the place and its paintings well surely do. The walls are still arrayed with large canvases by Abstract Expressionist masters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, but where once these works were surrounded by simple wooden frames, they now hang naked, their rough, paint-splattered edges and rusting staples on view to the world.

“It was convention to have the frames,” Ann Temkin explained recently as she walked around the gallery and stopped in front of Kline’s “Painting Number 2” (1954). That convention, Ms. Temkin felt, had domesticated the paintings in a way that obscured how radical they were, what a “profound break with the past,” and last fall she ordered the frames removed in one of her first acts as the Modern’s new chief curator of painting and sculpture.

“Now these strokes explode off the canvas,” she said happily, pointing to Kline’s signature black slashes. “It has a freedom now.”

In the year and two months since she succeeded John Elderfield in the job, Ms. Temkin, 49, has been working to break with the past herself — most surprisingly, perhaps, in her approach to the so-called permanent collection. Ranging from van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889) and Matisse’s “Dance (I)” (1909) to de Kooning’s frenzied “Woman, I” (1950-52) and Andy Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” (1962), this collection — or rather a selection from it that has been on view for decades — has done more than any other to define modern art and shape the public’s understanding of its history. The 26 rooms of the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, which have housed these highlights of the collection on the fourth and fifth floors of the Modern’s “new” building since it opened in 2004, might reasonably be regarded as sacrosanct: the heart of the museum and of modern art generally.

But under Ms. Temkin, the permanent collection display is quickly becoming less permanent. Galleries that once changed only when works were loaned out are now subject to frequent renewal. For the first time, media other than painting and sculpture appear frequently throughout the Barr galleries. Artists who never quite made it into official “schools” are getting more play, and schools that the museum once passed up are getting pride of place.

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One fourth-floor room is now devoted entirely to the Fluxus movement.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Even small changes, like swapping out a single well-known artist for another, can make for major shifts in the museum’s familiar and stately narrative of modernism’s progress. The fourth floor, covering the early 1940s to the early 1970s, used to begin with Jackson Pollock’s “Stenographic Figure” (1942). Now Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture “Quarantania I” (1947-53) sets the tone for the entire era.

“At first I was shocked, and then I was impressed,” said Pepe Karmel, the chairman of the art history department at New York University, who spent three years as an adjunct curator in the Modern’s painting and sculpture department in the 1990s. In addition to the obviously different message conveyed by introducing such historic galleries with work by a still-living woman, Ms. Bourgeois’s rounded stalagmites, Mr. Karmel said, “fit in perfectly with the works by Rothko, Masson and Gorky — all pictures of this biomorphic moment.”

Ms. Temkin emphasized that she was not pushing for wholesale change. “I want the visitors who come back again and again to encounter new work, but some of their favorites will be there. We want them to eat their cake and have it, too.”

But her larger point, she said, is an art historical one about how a familiar parade of greatest hits is misleading to viewers. “I want to be true to the collection and what really goes on in art — that there’s more than you can possibly know, rather than the falsely reassuring view that you can get your head around it all,” she said.

“The tradition here has been fluid special exhibitions and the permanent collection is relatively unchanging,” she added. “I want a fluidity and constant rhythm of change.”

Rethinking the Barr galleries, Ms. Temkin said, combines the pleasures and challenges “of art history and rearranging the furniture.” Last spring, for instance, she moved a whole room full of works by Piet Mondrian so that a set of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi would be visible through a doorway, creating a kind of visual echo. “They were both so dedicated to the idea of pure abstraction,” she said.

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Ann Temkin, MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, has featured “Quarantania I” by Louise Bourgeois and put a Juan O'Gorman next to a Frida Kahlo.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

Around a corner from a room of Pop works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, another room is now devoted to the neo-Dadaist Fluxus movement of the 1960s and ’70s, never collected in depth by MoMA. The museum received a 3,000-piece bequest this year, and Ms. Temkin wanted to get it on view right away.

“Rather than being punished for missing the moment, we end up being able to display it in splendid fashion — with a delay of only 40 years,” she said. Nose-thumbing Fluxus works, like a neon sign of Picasso’s signature by Robert Watts, are now packed floor-to-ceiling into a small space, evoking the movement’s playful style.

Even in galleries with familiar themes and many familiar works, Ms. Temkin and her staff have mixed in surprises. “When there are one or two fresh things in a room, it puts viewers on alert,” she said. When she helped to reinstall the gallery of early 20th-century Mexican art, for example, Ms. Temkin’s deputy Leah Dickerman included a relatively obscure, delicately colored landscape by Juan O’Gorman, “The Sand Mines of Tetelpa” (1942), among works by artists like Frida Kahlo.

“Who knew we had that painting?” said the museum’s director, Glenn D. Lowry. “It’s a great picture, and we haven’t had it on the wall for 25 years.”

Although the Modern’s five-year-old building affords more display space than the museum has ever had, Ms. Temkin and her staff can fit only some 400 works in the Barr galleries out of 2,800 from before 1975 — “a never-ending resource,” as she put it.

This trove has allowed her to make other choices that tweak the traditional take on the modern. This past spring, in a small gallery on the fourth floor, she installed part of “The Migration Series” (1940-41), a suite of 30 paintings by the African-American painter Jacob Lawrence, who gave each work a long, explanatory title.

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“Quarantania I” by Louise Bourgeois.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

“I wanted to go against the cliché of high modernism, which was invested in the idea that you don’t need words,” Ms. Temkin said. “For me, Lawrence is one of the great American artists.”

Female artists have a more prominent place in some galleries. In the room devoted to Russian Constructivism — a movement more welcoming to women than others of the early 20th century — Temkin installed six works by Lyubov Popova, one of the few women prominent in the group, and six theater-related prints by Alexandra Exter, an obscure name to most visitors.

Ms. Temkin said she wasn’t comfortable attributing their inclusion to feminism per se. “It’s more of a generational thing,” she said, referring to the fact that younger curators now run the Modern. “There’s a desire to expand our account of art history.”

“Jacob Lawrence wasn’t an ‘ism,’ and lots of women weren’t in ‘isms,’” she said, “because the ‘isms’ wouldn’t let them in. You leave out a lot if you only go with big ‘isms.’ ”

Ms. Temkin is developing labels that will explain the themes of rooms in the Barr galleries; currently only individual works have wall texts. She said it was needed as the composition of rooms went beyond official art historical movements: “We can’t expect people to read our minds.”

Perhaps the most significant change, in the context of MoMA’s traditions, is the mixing of media in the galleries. Beginning in the 1960s, MoMA’s curatorial departments were rigidly divided: painting and sculpture, drawing, photography and architecture were separate worlds. The painting and sculpture galleries rarely showed works in other media.

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Juan O'Gorman next to a Frida Kahlo.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Now 75 of the roughly 400 works in the Barr galleries are something other than paintings or sculptures.

“This is how contemporary eyes see it,” said Ms. Temkin, who was hired by the Modern as a senior curator from the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003. “Nowadays artists work in all media.”

Mr. Lowry said that with Ms. Temkin’s promotion, “these boundaries are dissolving aggressively, and they should. What Ann has done is make a priority an idea that has been percolating for a decade.”

Despite the shifts, Ms. Temkin knows that some greatest hits, and some famous chapters of art history, are not optional.

Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” isn’t going anywhere. Room 2 on Floor 5, with Cubist works by Picasso and Braque, won’t be morphing radically. “This is pretty tightly choreographed,” she said. “We’re the one place in the world where you can see the development of Cubism all together. It would be perverse not to do that.”

But she is committed to a more experimental approach. “Some things may not work out,” she said, but “fear of failure” should not be an obstacle to undertakings like her unframing of the abstract works.

“It was in the spirit of trying things,” she added — “not something people associate with the fourth and fifth floors.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 25, 2009, on page AR24 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA, ‘Permanent’ Learns to Be Flexible. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe